"A fiatal óvónő lemegy a vízhez."
Translation:The young kindergarten teacher goes down to the water.
38 Comments
Just a minor random gripe ... I wish they had used a different profession for their go-to "professional person" sentences. óvónő is easy enough, but "kindergarten teacher" takes a week to type, and gets tiring having to type it in for every third sentence.
Not to mention the three alternative translations given for it, two of which are hardly ever accepted! (I do pity the course creators all the extra work they made for themselves because of this...)
EDIT: and is "preschool teacher" listed or accepted anywhere?
If "goes to the water" is accepted, then why does the sentence need le- in front of megy? Couldn't it just say "A fiatal óvónő megy a vízhez"? What does le- add in this case? Does it just make it a completed action?
It seems like the author of this course has as obsession with kindergarten teachers :)
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think an óvónő has to be a woman ;) and that other words would be used in the, culturally uncommon, case of it being a man.
------- in american, kindergarten is a specific class before first grade. nursery school is for 2,3,4 year-olds . . .
Big 14 dec 17
What is the purpose of this comment? I am not under the impression that the American and Hungarian education systems correspond precisely, yielding the variety of translations always appearing in the hints for Duo Hungarian's favorite occupation.
-------- just that a nursery school (teacher ) works with kids ages 2,3 and 4. a kindergarten teacher works only with 5 year old kids. so nursery school teacher is not a synonym for kindergarten teacher . . .
And an óvónő works with kids from 3 to 6 or 7. An óvoda (the place were an óvónő works) is by no means equivalent to either an American kindergarten or preschool.
So when it comes to translating, it just seems like a case of choose your poison. If a technical text, I think I'd want to just explain what an "óvoda" is and then use "óvoda teacher."
Depends on the country. In New Zealand kindergarten teachers work with children under 5 (2-4); while 5 year olds are at primary school with a primary teacher.
In the U.S. 5-year-olds are also in primary school — in kindergarten ;) But your comment does help me understand why the presumably British-English-informed (Oxford dictionary says the NZ usage of "kindergarten" applies to the UK as well) Hungarian incubator team came to pick "kindergarten teacher" as the top translation for "óvónő".
Seems like just another case when actually labeling what dialect the suggested translations correspond to would be most helpful. (Although it wouldn't get the exact idea across, it'd at least be obvious to Americans we weren't talking about somebody who works in an elementary school.)
Mmm - "primary school" in NZ is the first 6 years - ages 5-10. We have kindergarten, pre-school, play centre, and kōhanga reo, and creche for kids under 5. Each has its own type of funding and name for those who work in them. Kind of confusing actually :-)
Not to labour the point made here many times, but in the UK we don't have kindergartens - they're NURSERIES! Don't know why Duolingo has to be so pedantically American-centric!
You confuse beta stage inconsistencies with "pedantic American-centrism" methinks. "Nursery teacher" and "nursery school teacher" are included as hints for "óvónő" essentially everywhere it appears in the course. (I don't know if the former is actually used anywhere; there's not a single occurrence of it in the Corpus of Contemporary American English.) If the option you prefer is missing in the translations in any specific instance, report it; there is, indeed, no need to "labour the point." I don't think I've ever seen "preschool teacher," which would probably be my candidate for the most sensible American quasi-equivalent.
I actually don't think there's much going on here about English dialect preference at all. "Kindergarten teacher" simply appears to be (here for example) the English translation one encounters for óvónő. The institution of pre-primary education in Hungry in which such individuals work lacks, I think, a precise analogue in the English-speaking world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Hungary#Pre-primary_education. I wouldn't be surprised if this translation preference, such as it is, has more to do with the German history of the concept of kindergarten than anything about English particularly.
Fwiw, "kindergartens" is hardly a common term in the U.S. (the first pages of Google results seem to be dominated by New Zealand) and when used I think it's essentially a colloquial alternative for "kindergarten class" (i.e. a group of students assigned to a certain teacher).
Many thanks Piguy3 for your considered and informative reply. My frustration comes simply from Duolingo's dogmatic insistence on "kindergarten" and rejecting in big red type a perfectly reasonable alternative! I don't understand why this really excellent learning aid isn't a little more flexible in what it accepts: it shouldn't be that difficult to expand its "white list". Still, as you say, it is only a beta version at present.
Indeed, adding any one translation isn't too big an effort. It's the cumulative effect of all the additions for the thousands of sentences in the course and the fact that it's not difficult for the number of valid Hungarian translations of an English sentence to run into the thousands. With its flexible word order, Hungarian is a singularly difficult language to teach from or to within the Duolingo set-up.
19
I would say that you could say "down" but you don't have to. The le- prefix does not mean "down" so much as it indicates a completed action.
I don't quite understand how an action in the present tense can be completed. Is it that it's expected to be completed, that it's expressing the intention of completing? As opposed to "is going to the water."
That said, I think "down to the water" is itself an idiomatic expression in English. If I'm on a beach, or near a river or whatever, and I'm walking toward the water, I'd probably say that I'm going down to the water. It's not so much part of the verb as part of the phrase "to the water." In English, that is.
- 19
You raise a good question about the present tense. But consider this: "She goes (down) to the river every Thursday." I think it's fair to say that we are talking here (in English) about completed trips each Thursday, not just about attempts at reaching the river that may or may not be completed each Thursday.
Also, bear in mind that English has a present perfect tense for describing completed actions: "She has gone (down) to the river". In contrast, Hungarian has no present perfect, and so relies on the prefix to give the sense of completion that can be expressed by the present perfect in English.
In other words, I think the question you raised about the present tense not showing completion is a fair observation about English, but perhaps not about Hungarian.
It seems to me that it should be.... Goes DOWN to the water! Isn't lemegy, down to?
-------- if you use the word bank to respond to this, there is no down offered to be used. kind of a give-away . . .
Big 14 jun 18
